Their message was clear, unanimous and withering: the UK
isbreaking its own lawsand fuelling a humanitarian
catastrophe by selling arms to Saudi Arabia.

British law is also clear: it is illegal
to sell arms to a state that is at a “clear risk” of committing international
humanitarian crimes.

But over the past year alone, Britain has sold around £6bn
worth of weapons to Saudi Arabia, whose campaign in Yemen is targeting
civilians –191 such attackshave collectively been reported by the
UN, HRW and Amnesty.

Saudi Arabia’s intervention has
precipitated the world’s worst humanitarian and development crisis: 82% of
Yemen’s population of 24 million peopleneed aid, 60% need food and 10% have fled
their homes.

MSF has seen
three of its facilities targeted in as many months. Weddings have been hit. So
too have homes for the blind.

A water bottling factory was struck with cruise
missiles, killing dozens of workers, whose bodies melted into the machinery.

The list goes on.

In his evidence to the CAEC
(itself made up of the committees from the departments of international
development, business, defence and foreign affairs) David Mepham, the UK
director of Human Rights Watch, implied the foreign secretary, Philip Hammond,
had lied in his defence of Britain’s arms sales to Saudi Arabia when he said
last month that Britain has found “no evidence of breaches of international humanitarian law”.

Mepham said he had personally handed him HRW’s documentary evidence, complete
with GPS coordinates of Saudi air strikes on schools, hospitals and markets.

He
added that the government “has had that evidence for months, and therefore it
is extraordinary the line can come back that they do not have the evidence,
when that evidence has been shared with them for a considerable period of
time.”

Another witness, Amnesty
International’s arms expert Oliver Sprague, questioned the honesty or the
competence of the government, which when questioned over allegations of Saudi
international humanitarian crimes in Yemen said: “The use of UK supplied
weaponry in the conflict inYemenis an operational matter for the Royal
Saudi Air Force.”

“That’s fundamentally incorrect,”
Sprague said. “The entire purpose of our export control regime is to link
responsibility of the exporter to the eventual use of their weapons … If they
say this is not a matter for us, it is impossible to authorise that weapon
lawfully.”

The only refutation of the testimony from the rights
groups was from CAEC member Daniel Kawczynski, who dismissed their field
research because he knew that no violations of international humanitarian law
had occurred – the head of the Royal Saudi Air Force had told him so.

On the fundamental issue being
examined by the CAEC of Britain’s complicity in Saudi war crimes, this is an
open-and-shut case.

The government knows what it is doing but it dresses it up
in the language of “supporting the legitimate government in Yemen”, when Yemen
has not had a proper election in 10 years.

The government views the humanitarian and human rights
disaster as a secondary consideration to the money private British arms
companies make off the war.

That the government affords Department for
International Development (DFID) no role in the decision-making process on to
which countries the UK sells arms is telling.

To fund the reconstruction of the civilian infrastructure
in Yemen, largely destroyed by the Saudis with our weapons, the United Nations
has asked international donors such as DFID for £1.8bn, which approximates to
the profits the UK arms industry has made off Saudi’s intervention in Yemen.

We
must escape the cycle of selling arms to dubious regimes to sow destruction and
then using the taxes on those arms sales to finance an aid budget to clean up
the mess.

To stop this cycle the government needs to do nothing more than obey
the law.